The House of Baltazar

by William John Locke

Baltazar met his eyes. “In fact, you want to know whether I’m not a bit mad.”

“Not at all,” laughed the doctor. “But I have a shrewd suspicion that the folly you bewail—the eccentric hermit life on the moor—was the result of some such rashly taken obligation.”

“Suppose it was,” said Baltazar; “what then?”

“I should say you were cultivating a very bad habit, and I should advise you to give it up.”

He smiled, waved a friendly hand, and ran down the steps to his car. Baltazar watched him crank-up, slip to the wheel, and depart, without saying a word in self-defence. So far from offending him, the doctor had risen higher in his estimation. A man with brains, and the faculty of using them; a fellow of remarkable penetration; also of courage. He differentiated his outspokenness from Pillivant’s blatancy. The former was one man of intellect speaking frankly to another; the latter. . . . He remembered the lecture, illustrated by quotations from the Chinese classics, which he had read to Quong Ho when his disciple, on his first visit to Water-End, had complained of the lack of manners of the local inhabitants. Why should he worry about Pillivant? As he had said to Quong Ho: “Rotten wood cannot be carved, and walls made of dirt and mud cannot be plastered.” Never mind Pillivant. It was Rewsby, and Rewsby’s quick summing-up of his psychological tendencies that mattered. Not a human being had ever before presented him to himself in any just and intelligible way. Of course he had heard truths, pseudo-truths, dictated by violent prejudice, in his brief and disastrous married life. But they had all been superficial; never gone to bed-rock. Since then he had been free as a god from criticism. And now came this shrewd, sagacious country doctor, who in the lightest, friendliest way in the world, put an unerring finger on the real unsound spot in his character.

“. . . A very bad habit, and I should advise you to give it up.”

Behind those commonplace words he knew lay a wise man’s condemnation of his habitual dealing with life. He walked through the tiny town on his way to “The Cedars,” unconscious of the curious interest of the inhabitants, to whom the sight of the mystery-enveloped and now bombed and head-bandaged tenant of Spendale Farm was a matter of eager, instantaneous mental photography, so that the picture could be produced as a subject for many weeks’ future gossip, and he pondered deeply over Dr. Rewsby’s criticism.

“Have you generally conducted your life on these extravagant principles?”

He had. There was no denying it. A childish memory emerged from the mist of years. He must have been eight or nine. All about a dog. A puppy had destroyed a new paint-box, priceless possession, and in a fit of passion he had nearly beaten the puppy to death. And when his anger was spent and he grew terribly afraid, and sprawled down by the puppy, the puppy licked his hand. And he swore to God, as a child, that if the puppy lived and did not tell his father, he would never beat a dog again. The puppy lived, and, with splendid loyalty, never breathed a word to a human soul, and loved him with a love passing the love of women. And one day a neighbour’s bad-tempered dog got into the kitchen-garden and attacked him, and though he had a stick by chance in his hand, he remembered his vow, and stood with folded arms and set teeth and let the dog bite his legs, until he was rescued by the gardener and carried indoors.

He remembered this, and a train of similar fantastic incidents culminating in his vow of solitude, and reviewed them all, in the light of Dr. Rewsby’s criticism. What good, in the name of sanity, had his wild, Quixotic resolves accomplished? How had they benefited Spooner, for instance, to whom he had surrendered the Senior Wranglership? During his brief stay in London he had had the curiosity to look up Spooner in reference books; found him an Assistant Secretary in a Government office, Sir William Spooner, K.C.B.; an honourable position, but a position which he would have attained—originally through the Civil Service examination—whether he had been second, fourth, tenth Wrangler in the Tripos. His, Baltazar’s, idiot sacrifice had advanced Spooner’s career not one millimetre: just as his self-denying ordinance in the realm of dogs had not benefited one jot the canine race—for the mongrel retriever who had bitten him heroically arm-folded, had been shot the next day by the remorseful neighbour, who had been longing for an opportunity of getting conscientiously rid of an ill-conditioned cur.